Have to say, I'm at Mix11 at the moment, and both the keynote and the hands on demos with the phone are quite impressive.
Unlike many android phones which mimic the iPhone style grid of icons, WP7 have gone for something unique. It's hard to equate this upgrade to any particular iOS upgrade in particular, but it's an impressive update.
2 interesting features
* Custom tiles - you can have a particular part of an app on your home screen. e.g. the DM section of your Twitter app, The Bugs Tab of your Bug tracking app, or the "Flight" section of your TripIt App etc.
* Full background processing (including uploading/downloading) & fast app switching.
Android wasn't mimicking iOS by the way. A grid of icons for links and applications has been a staple UI component of computers and phones for well over a decade.
iOS goes for pure shortcuts, WP7 goes for pure widgets, and Android has a mix of both. That being said, WP7's implementation of a widget home screen / phone "desktop" is quite nicely done. I agree with you that this upcoming update is impressive to say the least.
Re: Android mimicking iPhone, okay I'll concede a grid of icons had been done before iOs, if you concede that Android clearly took a lot of guidance from precisely how iOS did it.
It does appear with Mango that WP7 may have leapfrogged both iPhone and Android, which is pretty impressive given how far behind they were a year ago.
Of course iPhone and Android have time to respond. But contrast this to last year where the announced feature set of WP7 was behind the shipping feature set of iPhone and Android.
What impressed me most though were the dev tools and SDK. They went from lots of gaps in the SDK and tooling to virtually none.
If you're a fan of mobile technology, the next couple of years are going to be great. I'm seriously looking forward to a Nokia device running WP7.
1) It appears that WP7 has done multitasking right. They have this notion of "Live Agents" which are agents that work in the background and are scheduled independent of the foreground process. I think I had proposed a similiar idea here on HN many moons ago -- maybe they read it :-)
It gives you the benefit of good battery life regardless of rogue 3rd party apps, while also giving you virtually unbounded multitasking scenarios.
2) Expanded hubs throughout the platform, so apps can be associated with Bing results. This was demoed with going directly from a movie to IMDB.
3) Being able to pin specific pieces of functionality from an app to the home page. Probably a tag on a Silverlight page. Will be very useful.
And there's virtually no scenarios where Android or iPhone surpass WP7 anymore. The main hole is app selection. Which is important, but given that WP7 has closed pretty much every gap, including in the SDK -- plus added stuff like Silverlight and XNA integration, I think we'll see some interesting times.
"And there's virtually no scenarios where Android or iPhone surpass WP7 anymore"
AirPlay, printing, unified Inbox, HTML5 browser, 3G tethering, visual voicemail, local notifications, FaceTime, regular updates that users actually receive, and the thousands of apps like Groupon, Layar, YouTube, Skype, Google Voice, Citibank, Amex, TripIt, etc.
First, I conceeded 3rd party app selection in my post, so to spend half of your post pointing that out is... well pointless. It's important, but I already mentioned it.
So now lets look at the actual support:
1) AirPlay. Well WP7 does support DLNA and some phones expose it, such as the LG. So if you want it, you can get it.
2) Unified Inbox. That is missing, although I suspect by design. It's a feature that would be nice to toggle on, but default off is the right design.
3) HTML 5 browser. It's part of Mango.
4) 3G tethering. It works, just not a supported feature.
5) Visual voicemail. This is actually one gap. It's suspected that it may be in Mango. They've had a registry entry for it since first release.
6) Local notifications. Live agents give a superset of the functionality of local notifications.
7) FaceTime. Supports Skype.
8) Regular updates. Users do receive the updates. ATT is just taking longer than everyone else. What WP7 does do though is push the updates as they're ready. This obviously causes some pain for those whose carriers are slower, but its better than waiting for everyone to be ready and ship all at once, giving the impression that everything happened at the same time.
So visual voicemail is the biggest scenario I see here. And if you use Google Voice you get that for free too.
Again, at one point in time the holes were huge. Now, they're small and niche. You can no longer dismiss WP7 based on feature set at all. Sure, it has strengths and weaknesses, but the platform as a whole seems stronger than Android/iOS. 3rd party apps are the biggest gap, and I do think with the improved tooling we'll see their app store continue to grow (and its already the fastest growing app store relative to open date).
WP& is playing catch up so clearly it has not leapfrogged the competition -- even accounting for Mango. But I think usability and UX will be the differentiator for WP7 when it does gain feature parity.
My prediciton is that by end of the year, WP7 will compete on an equal footing with Android and iOS in terms of feature parity. It might still have an order of magnitude less number of apps, but I suspect that with the opening up of this richer API, the app situation will be much improved as well. This will set up Nokia's entry to the market in 2012. Combining WP7 with good hardware and services like turn-by-turn navigation and a huge retail channel is a recipe for great sales. I am now beginning to believe that Nokia has made a very smart bet.
Past a certain point, that stops mattering. Does iPhone have 1 million apps available, or is it 10 million ? I don't know and I don't care. what I do know is (assuming that I had an iPhone not android)
- 90% of them are crap. Sturgeon's law.
- I would install fewer than 100 of them.
- There's probably an app for it. For any it. e.g. Today I found and installed an app for my local airport, so I can keep track of an upcoming flight.
- There are several good twitter clients, but I'll only install one.
- Between maps, twitter, facebook, calendar, email and angry birds, there's 95% of my app usage accounted for.
And you could say roughly the same for WP7, even if there's only 10 000 apps avaialble.
Some time this year. But they haven't really been more specific than that. I'd guess just before Thanksgiving, but that's not really an educated guess even.
Unlike many android phones which mimic the iPhone style grid of icons, WP7 have gone for something unique. It's hard to equate this upgrade to any particular iOS upgrade in particular, but it's an impressive update.
2 interesting features * Custom tiles - you can have a particular part of an app on your home screen. e.g. the DM section of your Twitter app, The Bugs Tab of your Bug tracking app, or the "Flight" section of your TripIt App etc. * Full background processing (including uploading/downloading) & fast app switching.